By John Henderer, The Chronicle, 4/29/99
Centralia and Chehalis won't have to return flood-control grant money to the state as Lewis County found itself doing this week, officials say.
More than $1 million in grants potentially teetered in the balance. The cities received the money to elevate homes and buy out flooded properties after the 1996 flood.
State and local officials said the cities' cases differed from the county problem.
County commissioners decided Tuesday to return a $115,000 grant to the state. A state official said the county broke a rule of federal government buyouts by allowing a private firm to build a dike on the bought-out property.
Federal rules require any purchased properties to remain as open space for future floodwater storage.
In Chehalis, the city accepted a net grant amount of more than $868,000 to buy 25 often-flooded properties near Shoreline Drive.
At one point the city hoped to discharge wastewater on the properties, which sit near the city's sewage treatment plant. The land would have been used as wetlands and as a biowaste.
The state Department of Ecology has issued restrictions on city wastewater discharges because of poor water quality in the Chehalis River.
"We don't have any plans at this point to do anything" with the land City Manager Dave Campbell said Wednesday.
In Centralia, the city has received $3.1 million in state and federal grants to elevate as many as 98 often flooded homes.
But at the same time, the city accepted a state grant to repair a dike along the Skookumchuck River, and authorized raising at least one home that sits behind the dike.
This home sits at the comer of B and Sixth streets, said Terry Calkins, community development manager The city spent $377,000 on dike repairs with state grant money
"(The dike) wasn't new, and we weren't increasing any flood-protection levels," Calkins said.
After learning of the county's dilemma, Centralia officials telephoned Marty Best the state hazard mitigation official who issued Lewis County the ultimatum to remove the Silver Creek dike or refund the buyout grant.
'We called Marty and we asked him what's going on up there," Calkins said. "We'd talked about this (redundancy) issue several times."
Best, likewise, said the cities' issues are different from the county's problem.
"It's like apples and watermelons," Best said, noting the county permitted the dike to be built on buyout lands.
A bigger concern for Centralia officials involved potential flood-Protection redundancies over home elevations, and a possible $80 million flood-control project on the Chehalis River, Calkins said.
Officials used $50,000 of the city's dike-repair grant to help pay for the Chehalis River study.
The project consultant claims his ideas would reduce local flooding by four feet, negating damages from a flood of 1996 proportions.
'We said, 'What if that ever gets done? Does it make sense to elevate homes?' " Calkins said. "But there's no guarantee that that'll ever get done. I mean, we're all optimistic and we're all hoping."
John Henderer covers county government and environmental issues for The Chronicle. He can be reached by e-mail at jhenderer@chronline.com or by calling 807-8239.
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